As Jason Lisk and I wrote about before the season, Tom Brady and Ben Roethlisberger have become something of the poster children so far this year when it comes to veteran QBs working with inexperienced and otherwise less-than-notable receiving groups. And, lo and behold, each has put up career-low RANY/A marks through 2 games. But how do their receiving corps rank relative to those of other teams so far this year, and how do they stack up historically?

To take a stab at answering these questions, I turned to True Receiving Yards. For each player who debuted in 1950 or later, I computed their Weighted Career True Receiving Yards for every year, as of the previous season, to get a sense of how experienced/accomplished they’d been going into the season in question. Then, I calculated a weighted averaged of those numbers for every receiver on a given team, using TRY during the season in question as the weights. For example, here are the 2013 Patriots receivers:

The way to read that is: Julian Edelman has accounted for 38 percent of the Pats’ TRY so far. Going into the season, he had a career Weighted TRY of 615.7, so he contributes to 38% of the 2013 Pats’ weighted average with his 615.7 previous career weighted TRY; Danny Amendola contributes to 20% of the team weighted average with his 1541.9 previous career weighted TRY; etc. Multiply each guy’s previous weighted career TRYs by the percentage of the team’s 2013 TRY he contributed, and you get a cumulative weighted average of 560.7 — meaning the average TRY of a 2013 Pats receiver has been gained by a guy who had a previous career weighted TRY of 560.7.

Is that a low number? Well, here are the numbers for all of the 2013 team receiving corps (not including Thursday night’s Eagles-Chiefs tilt), inversely sorted by weighted average (asterisks indicate rookies):

As it turns out, yes — the Patriots’ receiving corps has been the 3rd most inexperienced/least accomplished thus far (according to previous career weighted TRY), trailing only the Jags and Rams. (I expect this to change whenever Rob Gronkowski returns, though the injury to Amendola could make things even worse in the short-term). As for the Steelers, their number is below-average but certainly not as dire as is generally implied in discussions of Roethlisberger’s poor performance thus far. While Jets rookie Geno Smith has been even worse with similarly inexperienced receivers, Kansas City’s Alex Smith has registered a -0.2 RANY/A to Roethlisberger’s -1.7 despite similar receiver quality, and Eli Manning has a -0.3 RANY/A despite even worse receiving corps (not to mention above-average performances by the likes of Sam Bradford, Andy Dalton, Russell Wilson, and EJ Manuel despite far less accomplished receivers than those of the Steelers). Overall, the correlation between team receiving experience/accomplishment and RANY/A in 2013 is 0.24 — so it’s a small factor, but hardly the sole determinant of a team’s passing performance.

Now, how do these numbers stack up historically, you ask? Here are the least-experienced/accomplished receiving corps ever, among teams who didn’t complete a single pass to a guy who debuted before 1950:

(You can also sort descending by weighted average to get a list of the most accomplished receiving corps ever.)

No surprise to see a lot of expansion teams rank highly, particularly those from the brand-new AFL in 1960. Aside from Billy Reynolds, the 1960 Raiders didn’t have a single player catch a pass who had previously accumulated TRY at the NFL level. (That they mustered an ANY/A within a half-point of league average was a minor miracle, and a huge credit to Tom Flores, who somehow posted a +0.7 RANY/A that year.)

Anyway, it’s extremely early yet, but this year’s Jaguars have one of the 30 least accomplished receiving corps in modern NFL history. And though the Rams, Patriots, and Raiders are a little less historically notable, they still crack the bottom 100 thus far, with the huge caveat that a great deal can and will change in this department (including the return of Justin Blackmon) before the season ends.

I had forgotten about Andre Rison’s season in Oakland. That 2000-2003 run obviously comes out so highly here largely because of the age of those players, but Tim Brown, Andre Rison, and that other dude were also impressive players, even though none of them were at their best by then. Sometimes it’s easy to forget how great a group that was.

http://www.pro-football-reference.com Neil Paine

Yeah, a future tweak to this would be applying Chase’s method of figuring out how good a receiver “should be” at each age if he has a weighted career TRY of x through age y, etc.

Rob Harrison

I thought something was wonky with Seattle’s placement on that first list, and then it hit me: why the heck is Jermaine Kearse on there instead of Sidney Rice?